D Day

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will become the first German leader to attend a commemoration of the 1944 D-day landings in June, after being invited by France. Ten years ago, Paris did not ask Chancellor Helmut Kohl to the high-profile 50th anniversary. French President Jacques Chirac's invitation marks a gesture of reconciliation contrasting with that apparent snub. "Mr.

Suddenly the long-heralded 50th anniversary of D-day has become as controversial a political issue in Britain as it has elsewhere in Europe. After investing millions of dollars and thousands of hours of planning and preparation to commemorate the Allied invasion of France on June 6, 1944, many voices here are suggesting: Let's call the whole thing off.

Crew members aboard a restored World War II cargo ship bound for D-day celebrations in France are steamed. Their 9,000-mile voyage was called off Saturday after the ship developed engines problems near Acapulco, Mexico. But the Lane Victory's captain said Tuesday he was never consulted, and maintains the crew is ready to go. "I feel lousy. I think it was doable," Capt. Bill Tilghman said from Acapulco.

U.S. warships, including the nuclear-powered carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower, retraced the D-Day invasion route and veterans returned to the beaches of Normandy to mark the 46th anniversary of the Allied invasion of France in World War II in 1944. The annual D-Day commemoration this year saluted Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, on the 100th year of his birth.

To 17-year-old Charles Butler, generations removed from World War II, D-day was something that lived only on a page in a history book. But after touring England earlier this month and taking part in events commemorating the 50th anniversary of D-day, Butler says the massive military offensive mounted by Allied forces on June 6, 1944, lives in him now. "A lot of people lost their family and friends," said Butler, a Southwest Los Angeles resident and Hamilton High student.

Presidents have marked the day standing atop the cliffs of Normandy. They have visited the cemeteries in northern France where the soldiers lie buried, and they have walked the once-bloody beaches. On Wednesday, 57 years after D-day, President Bush turned to the little town on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains that bore the greatest American burden.

A small building set in a grove of chestnut trees on Berlin's once-grand Unter den Linden houses Germany's central war memorial: Inside its walls, heavily incised by machine-gun fire from half a century ago, stands a single bronze sculpture of a woman cradling the body of her son. "To the victims of war and tyranny," reads the inscription. If there were any interest on the part of Germans in commemorating the Normandy landings today, it ought to be evident here.

Eisenhower, Churchill and their troops pursued him 50 years ago. But they gave up the hunt for Hitler on Friday in South Gate. Leaders of an 800-member veterans group planning to have a Hitler look-alike take a mock drubbing from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill impersonators at a D-day anniversary celebration say the enemy is no longer invited. "We couldn't find a decent Hitler," said Bob Stane, president of the B-17 Combat Crewmen & Wingmen's Assn.

True, they did not take part in the D-day invasion. But Russians' memories of their tremendous sacrifices during World War II remain so powerful that it could not help but rankle when no representative from Moscow was invited to the grand-scale 50th anniversary celebrations in Normandy. So badly did the oversight offend, in fact, that President Boris N.

Under an overcast sky not unlike the morning 63 years ago that Allied forces stormed the Norman beaches below, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Wednesday pointed to their sacrifice to argue that the U.S. and France have long worked together to defeat tyranny and now must do so again. Speaking at the U.S.